Re: LuaJIT without the JIT?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:07 PM, Francesco Abbate
<francesco.bbt@gmail.com> wrote:
> system or something similar. The fact that you have no types at all
> and no warnings of any kind even for a small typing error is terrible
> when you develop something even moderately complex. In addition you
> don't even have a debugger so it is even more painful.

So that would seem to be a big priority: push the tooling to a new
level.  Once my runway is cleared of scheduled flights, I can get back
to my old interest in Lua debugging, based on the clidebugger module.
It works well enough in SciTE, and I am going to do a careful revisit
of LuaGDB for Emacs.  The situation can certainly be improved, but it
isn't easy work (debugging debuggers tends to push the brain a lot)
(There is also Decoda, which is a commercial product)

As for type information, one way is 'explicit type annotations'.
Metalua allows that as an extension, and LuaMacro can do that as well;
one can choose to generate code that throws assertions on declared
types as well.  But I mostly see type annotations as a 'code as
documentation' extension.

(The interesting flip-side of syntax extensions is that you need a
corresponding extensible documentation tool as well, which is one of
the future directions for ldoc.)

steve d.